Tuesday, 8 January 2013

It's been a while

It's been about a month since I spammed you all with those 6 posts in a day, so I figured you'd had enough of a break and I should come back and tell you what I've been up to! Deadlines are upon me, so I'm sure you'll probably be getting just as many blog posts for January as well!

To start off with, an update on one of my personal projects :D If you've been following my blog, you may have noticed that in December, I made a post called 'personal projects', didn't really explain until later what any of them were. Well, the storyboard I featured there was part of a Multi Animator Project I joined for Christmas.

One of the things that sparked my interest in animation was a community of people on youtube who were animating the Warrior Cats book series by Erin Hunter, about 5 or 6 years ago. These people also went on to animate their own original characters (or OC's) and I got into animating on Paint and Windows Movie Maker by animating a purple and orange fennec fox character I had made. (I have 10 OC characters in total that I used to write little storys about when I was a bit younger)

A good friend of mine, someone who used to animate the Warrior Cats series was holding a Multi Animator Project based on the 12 days of Christmas song by Relient K. The aim of this project was that 32 different animators would each animate about 7 seconds of this song and it'd all be put together at the end to make a music video, featuring many different OC's, to this song.

I applied to join and got accepted and given Part 22, the 10th day of christmas with the lyric parts "On the 10th day of Christmas my true love gave to me, 10 lords re leaping, 9 ladies dancing, eight maids are milking, seven swans are swimming, six geese are laying" which I had to animate to.

If you're interested in seeing the storyboard I did for this, it is in my previous blog post here.
My part is below.

I animated this in Adobe Flash CS3 and it incorperates all 10 of my characters. I was really glad I joined this project in the end as it gave me more experience in Flash, something I have not used very much. The only real difficulty I came across was that I had to go back home for christmas, half was through animating it, meaning I had to leave my Rig at home and work on the rest with a 5 year old laptop...which had it's fair share of arguements with flash, wouldn't play back animations to me and took about a minute to create a new keyframe. As you can probably imagine, he last few days of this project were kind of painful and I think the animation quality suffered a little because of this (the beginning until the blue dragon jumps in were animated on campus, the rest animated at home).

Overall though, I'm quite happy with the outcome and have joined another MAP, to the song Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, which is scheduled for Feburary 2013 :3

Below is the final MAP, with everyones part in (two people unfortunately failed to meet the deadline, so there's text in two parts, but other than that, I think everyone did amazing and it came out really well!)

As far as University projects go, I'm plodding along xD Getting there with everything now, I have some more 3D work to put up at some point along with some of my cinematography stuff :3 Deadline pressure is taking it's toll on my sleep, but heck is it gonna be worth it in the end (I hope xD)
So yush, keep your eyes peeled for some cinematography, 3D, my showreel, sketchbook work and finally my next MAP :D